Bursting with flavor and good humor, this single long, lovely fairy tale bows to an abundance of classic tales while keeping everything fresh. Storm, champion maker of fireworks, and older sister Aurora, housekeeper extraordinaire and baker of madeleines, watch their useless parents disappear quickly (natch). Mother dies giving birth to verbally precocious baby Anything, and father wanders away in grief. The three sisters are a sweet household until lupine Dr. DeWilde comes seeking the small magical pipe that mother bequeathed to Storm. Frantically escaping, the sisters scramble through woods, enchanted towns, a candy-house orphanage, cottages, castles, ice fields and a mountain of slavery. Grey’s black-and-white drawings perfectly complement Gardner’s playful textual winks—both honor a cornucopia of archetypal tales, blatantly and subtly. The sisters’ story is a fairy tale itself, yet Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel and The Pied Piper are also old books that characters read. It works because Gardner anchors everything warmly in Storm, who’s wonderfully genuine and full of resourcefulness. Delightful. (Fantasy. 8-11)
Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-75115-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a second set of entries—of a planned three, all first published in somewhat different form online in installments—slacker diarist Greg starts a new school year. After a miserable summer of avoiding swim-team practice by hiding out in the bathroom (and having to wrap himself in toilet paper to keep from freezing), he finally passes on the dreaded “cheese touch” (a form of cooties) to an unsuspecting new classmate, then stumbles through another semester of pranks and mishaps. On the domestic front, his ongoing wars with older brother Rodrick, would-be drummer in a would-be metal band called Löded Diper, share center stage with their mother’s generally futile parenting strategies. As before, the text, which is done in a legible hand-lettered–style font, is liberally interspersed with funny line drawings, many of which feature punch lines in speech balloons. Though even less likable that Junie B. Jones, Greg is (well, generally) at least not actively malicious, and so often is he the victim of circumstance or his own schemes gone awry that readers can’t help but feel empathy. This reasonably self-contained installment closes with a truce between the siblings. A temporary one, more than likely. (Illustrated fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8109-9473-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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